1) heavy social media users are prone to conflict (and, more generally, a lot of users experience negative interactions, physical fight and even end up breaking friendships because of online communication)…

2) ..yet overall people declare they feel closer to others, more compassionate and feeling good about themselves.

How can this contradiction be explained? According to the author “social networking is a mixed bag of good and bad”. I, for one, would like to suggest another way of interpreting these results: social media users are not hostile despite the fact they feel closer to one another. Rather, they are hostile because they feel closer. Closeness primarily comes to mean that users approach social media sites with higher expectations about friendship and togetherness. Social networking might thus imply adopting a social style characterized by a hypertrophied sense of intimacy, verging on liberty – like in the expression “taking liberties”: being too friendly in a way that shows a lack of respect to others.

Facebook “friending” rhetoric plays a part in this process, of course: by spreading an irenic vision of harmonious social life, any deviation from emotional proximity is perceived as a major break in the code of communication. In this sense, while interacting in the informal environment of social media, individuals not only fail to cultivate deference, but they even come to think of it as a transgression of an implicit social norm, as a manifestation of distance – or, worse, indifference – that compromises social cohesion and introduces an element of mistrust conducive to conflict.

This text was presented at the conference “Web Culture: New Modes of Knowledge, New Sociabilities”, Villa Gillet, Lyon (France), February 10th, 2011. Check against delivery. Click here for the .pdf version. Click here for the French translation.

In today’s presentation I will focus on the kind of social structures that users of computer-mediated global online communication networks (notably, the Web and social media) contribute to put in place. The point I will try to make is that science understanding of Web-based sociabilities has progressed enormously in the last decade, and that this should inform public policies touching on the Web, its regulation and governance.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE COMPUTER BUMS GONE?

Early glimpses into the social implications of ICT at a micro-level (that is: for the users themselves) date back to the mid-1970s and focus on the negative effect of these technologies. At the very origins of computer culture, we witness the emergence of the stereotype of the socially awkward computer hacker, isolated by the calculating machine which alienates him and keeps him apart from his peers. This characterization dates back to a time before the Web. In his Computer Power and Human Reason : From Judgement to Calculation (1976) Joseph Weizenbaum delivers us the portrayal of this subculture of compulsive computer programmer – or, as he liked to dub them, “computer bums”.

These are “possessed students” who “work until they nearly drop, twenty, thirty hours at a time. Their food, if they arrange it, is brought to them: coffee, Cokes, sandwiches. If possible, they sleep on cots near the computer. […] Their rumpled clothes, their unwashed and unshaven faces, and their uncombed hair all testify that they are oblivious to their bodies and to the world in which they move. They exist, at least when so engaged, only through and for the computers.”

Since this first occurrence, and for a long time, common sense has almost unmistakably associated computer use and social isolation. Cultural analysts, novelists, commentators have been developing on this trope. Iconic cyberpunk author William Gibson, famously described Case, the main character of Neuromancer (1984), as a cyberspace-addict incapable of functioning in an offline social situation.

By now, you might have heard of Chatroulette, if you are hip and tech-savvy if those two things at the sides of your face are your ears. By the way, I hope you did not click on the link. It’s not safe for work. And by that I mean you will be sucked into a world of sheer immorality which will challenge all your values and potentially wreck civilisation. Or (but this is simply my own guess) it will lead you to yet another overhyped internet chat service designed to put you in touch via webcam with random strangers.

Of course, "random" may be synonymous with "dressed like an idiot".

A few facts

So, bottom line, Chatroulette goes something like: you log in, you bump into someone, you evaluate, you click on “next”. Basically, each time you connect you have to ask yourself “Do I like this person?”. If you do, just go on chatting. If you don’t, just “next” him/her and the service puts you in contact with someone else, anybody else. It might be a teenage boy making faces, or a beautiful girl with a generous cleavage, or an old pervert doing whatever it is that perverts do on-screen. (more…)

The story so far, can be summarized as follows: since the beginning of the Web, a significant amount of researches has being focusing on the inverse correlation between online connectivity and face-to-face interactions. In social sciences, this is known as “the Internet Paradox”, after the title of an influential article published by Robert Kraut (1998). In a nutshell, Internet can be regarded as a “social technology that reduces social involvement”. Consequently user’s well-being and social ties could be negatively affected by computer-mediated communication.

This argument was so compelling – and so remenescent of the common sense claim that “since computers are around, people don’t talk anymore” – that the Internet paradox long outlived its scientific credibility. Some years later, Kraut himself made amends for it in a follow-up article, admitting that his argument had to be “rivisited”. He went back to observe the very same families of the previous study and found the negative effect of online communication on social life had disappeared. Not only, but he even detected positive effects of using the Internet on communication, social involvement, and well-being. A hell of a retraction, if you ask me.

Now, as epistemologists know, bad theories are difficult to flush out. Especially when you have people who can exploit them to serve their political agenda – or to spin themselves a cheap media story, as recently a certain British fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine did.

Luckily for us, Canadian sociologist Barry Wellman has been fighting against this research trend since its first apperence. And luckily for us, these days he seems to be prevailing. (more…)